Are you pea, forest or Kelly green? I stumbled upon this question on www.gogreentravelgreenc.om while planning our family trip to Florida. In a nutshell, pea green people care about the environment but won’t go out of their way to protect it. Forest green people are the greenest of the green, always choosing the greenest possible option. My life is Kelly Green –somewhere in the middle – but I have my forest moments. (Full disclosure, I have had my pea green moments as well).I love the “shades of green” concept. You don’t have to be perfectly green all the time but you can make a choice somewhere on the green spectrum. A better shade of green travel was my recent mission. It is easy to get into a green routine at home but much like my diet, I tend to fall off the wagon when I’m on the road.

Flying across the country isn’t exactly forest green transportation but biking from Northern Minnesota to Disney World was out of the question. With a little thought, you can come up with a lot of things to keep your vacation life on the green spectrum. As usual, I became obsessed with greening one thing particular – the dreaded bottled water.In my real life I rarely buy bottled water but I find them hard to avoid when vacationing in hot places like Florida, Arizona or Texas. Last year I brought my empty metal drinking bottle in my carry-on but failed to anticipate that it might look like a small missile on the x-ray machine. Let’s just say security was a bit of a hassle. I could have done without the annoyed sighs, embarrassed head shaking and general eye rolling from my family too. I picked the metal one because it is small and didn’t take up much room. It wasn’t really welcome at a lot of places we went though, since it wasn’t see-through and I could have been “smuggling in liquor”, as a very thorough guard at Bush Gardens informed me. It occurred to me that vodka would be pretty easy to conceal in a see-through water bottle but something told me this guy would have been all over that. In the end, the hotel water always tasted a little too funky anyway, so the whole thing was a bust.

Warning! Vodka ruins the filter ;)

This year I found PBA –free Britta water bottles with little water filters in the caps. They were perfect. The water tasted better, we could take them everywhere and I didn’t buy single wasteful, expensive bottled water the entire trip. I also found Platypus collapsible water bottles that would be great for packing light and would look nothing like a missile in your carry-on. What are your green travel tips / experiences?